14 DAY TRIAL // Remember those smart contact lenses that Google was talking about a while back? Well, the company just announced that it has reached an agreement to collaborate on the development of the idea with Novartis, a multinational pharmaceutical company from Switzerland.
The smart contacts are thought out to be helpful for people that suffer from diabetes. According to the original announcement from Google X, these would replace the regular glucose monitoring technique that has people pricking their fingers to test out the blood sugar levels.
Since it isn’t uncommon for people to forget to run the tests as often as they should, the lenses would be particularly useful because they’d always provide information to the smartphone by analyzing the glucose in tears with the help of a small wireless chip and a glucose sensor.
“We’re also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we’re exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds,” Google wrote at the time.
Now that Google and Novartis are pairing up for this task, the Swiss company’s Alcon division will be handling the development and commercial part of the Google smart lens.
“The agreement between Google and Alcon represents an important step for Novartis, across all of its divisions, to leverage technology to manage human diseases and conditions. Google's key advances in the miniaturization of electronics complement Novartis's deep pharmaceuticals and medical device expertise. Novartis aims to enhance the ways in which diseases are mapped within the body and ultimately prevented,” reads the announcement made by Novartis earlier.
The company’s CEO, Joseph Jimenez said that they are looking forward to work with Google to bring together the Internet giant’s advanced technology and Novartis’ knowledge of biology to meet the medical needs of many.
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder also addressed the topic. “Our dream is to use the latest technology in the miniaturization of electronics to help improve the quality of life for millions of people. We are very excited to work with Novartis to make this dream come true,” Brin said.
Under this agreement, Google X and Alcon will collaborate to develop a smart lens that has the potential to address ocular conditions with the help of non-invasive sensors, microchips and other miniaturized electronics embedded into contact lenses.
Novartis expressed an interest in two areas. First of all, it wants to help diabetic patients manage their disease by measuring their glucose levels, which is the original purpose of the lenses Google introduced some months ago.
Additionally, it wants to help people with presbyopia who can no longer read without glasses. For them, the smart lenses have the potential to “provide accommodative vision correction to help restore the eye’s natural autofocus on near objects in the form of an accommodative contact lens or intraocular lens as part of the refractive cataract treatment.”
The move comes a day after Google X former chief, Babak Parviz, who invented Google Glass and who co-founded the smart contact lens project, left the company to move on to Amazon.